On 18 April 2011 16:24, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> Re. cmo:represents and cmo:representedBy, I think there was a kind of
> consensus on this list prior to your proposal, as Alistair is hinting at:
> using foaf:focus [1] for links between the SKOS concept of the "thing" (and
> the "thing" refered to in FOAF could perfectly be an (OWL) class such as
> vacoule or lytic_vacoule).
>
> Acknowledging this, any CMO solution should be aligned with it (either by
> re-using that property or mapping to it via RDFS/OWL property axioms). Or
> make a serious case against foaf:focus!
IMHO foaf:focus works well for specific named entities; it works less
well for classes, and I have been wondering how best to address this.
The difference is in the pragmatics of whether we say that foaf:focus
is a functional property. If the SKOS concept under consideration is
#fido_the_dog, then its foaf:focus would be Fido, a Dog. And if there
were two or three URIs around (dbpedia, freebase, VIAF, ...) for that
self-same entity, they're all owl:sameAs each other. If the SKOS
concept were #dogs, ... we could still use foaf:focus to point to
(various different) classes corresponding to the class of things that
are dogs. But having an implied sameAs amongst them all is likely to
be less useful, less accurate, and more contentious. Since it is
tempting to declare foaf:focus functional, this would likely mean
nudging out the class use case to a companion property, eg.
focusClass. Or maybe there's an OWL2 idiom that can accomodate having
it both ways...
Dan
> [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus